Large retail operations face enormous challenges tracking inventory and preventing errors while ensuring products are correctly stored in the proper location in their warehouses. In most warehouse settings, the movement of pallets as part of shipping, receiving, inventory, and warehouse management is an integral part of the business operations. On any given day, hundreds of pallets can come in and go out of large distribution centers. It is not always easy to accurately identify the pallet and its contents or to assign the pallet to the proper location in the warehouse and record that location correctly. Such warehouse inventory inaccuracies can cause a number of inefficiencies.
Besides inventory, today's fleet managers are faced with new challenges posed by government mandates and private-sector goals that include reducing petroleum use, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and complying with alternative-fuel mandates. Choosing the right technologies to reach these goals is a complex process that requires an understanding of the technological landscape in addition to the makeup and operational requirements of each fleet. Furthermore, in a challenging economy, managing a fleet efficiently is more important than ever to reduce costs and improve fleet utilization. Virtually every successful organization relies on fleets and mobile workforces—from transportation companies and manufacturing enterprises with field engineers, to retail companies providing home deliveries, to local governments tracking city service and emergency vehicles and personnel.
In the current market many game developers are ignoring the exciting new possibilities cellular phones and other personal devices provide via their inherent ability to maintain connectivity while on the move. One possibility is to extend the virtual world of traditional video games through location-based information, which allows users to play games that incorporate knowledge of their physical location and landscape, and then provides them with the ability to interact with both real and virtual objects within that space.
The above applications present many new possibilities for location and identification system and services. However, currently there is no accurate method to quickly and easily identify people or interactive agents or objects in a campus environment, in a large building, in crowded meeting places, in a conference room, or walking outside your building. Several applications have been developed that expand on the ubiquitous GPS technology. Such application individually may provide some aspects of location and identification services. Some examples include Xobni for integrated search, Google Latitude for GPS tracking, and 4 Square for location based recommendations. Second Life and other virtual games use a similar user interface for virtual environments. GPS, Wi-Fi, and similar technologies are limited to providing rough location parameters. The newest Wi-Fi systems provide better locating capability that can narrow a location down to 20 to 30 meters.
However, that is still way too rough for identifying people that are sitting in a crowded space. In addition, accurately locating agents or objects, other than people, presents the same dilemma.